Transcript Slide 1

eLanguage.net
Shifting the paradigm in linguistics from
academic publishing to scholarly communication
*Dieter Stein, Cornelius Puschmann
University of Duesseldorf
[email protected]
[email protected]
PKP Scholarly Publishing Conference 2007
12 July 2007
Contents of this presentation
• eLanguage: Concept & Organization
• The Technology
• Where We Are
• The Future: Beyond the Paper Metaphor
A) eLanguage: Concept and Organization
What is eLanguage?
• an aggregator for peer-reviewed content from OA journals in Linguistics
• a platform for publishing scientific articles on-line
• a source of meta-information on academic Linguistics (book reviews,
department news etc)
• an academic community on the Web
Project Partners
From Language to eLanguage
1.
Language started in 1924
2.
roughly 7,000 individual and
institutional subscribers
3.
issues since 2001 available via
Project MUSE
4.
narrow focus due to space
limitations
5.
slow publication cycle
6.
high production and dissemination
costs
A) the goal was to widen the focus
B) while at the same time reducing
costs
C) and facilitating access
...an Open Access approach was the
ideal solution
eLanguage organizational structure
A) the eLanguage
editorial board reviews
co-journal proposals
eL Editor in Chief
B) the editor in chief is
eL Editorial Board
responsible for the
management of the
Constructions
JMALL
platform
C) co-journals are
independent once they
S&P
LiLT
have been approved
Co-journal accreditation process
Team of researchers behind
a prospective new journal
eLanguage Editorial Board
New Journal
forms an editorial board and
submits a proposal
reviews proposal and approves
or asks for revisions
is admitted as an eLanguage
co-journal
Expanded organizational structure
content
IT services
B) The Technology
A mashup of tools
OJS 2.1.1
+
Wordpress 2.2
Data from OJS and WP aggregated on the main page
blog section
content (WP)
co-journal
content (OJS)
master
feed
Open Source Reliability
all second-level products (OJS, WP) are based on first-level FOSS
technologies and protocols such as PHP, MySQL, Apache and RSS/Atom
1.
2.
mature, well-supported and well-documented products
3.
90% of software development is outsourced - advantage : we can focus on
the content and on making it accessible
Using external tools for added services
•Google Domain Tools (admin)
•Google Custom Search (search)
•Google Mail (email)
•Google Groups (mailing lists)
•Google Analytics (web statistics)
•Technorati (blog management)
•Feedburner (feed diagnostics)
Three goals for maximum accessibility
• to make all eLanguage content
accessible via search
• to make everything published in
eLanguage accessible both via library
catalogs and commercial search
engines
• to make access to our content
independent from access to our
website by using feeds (everything
but the full text of articles is available
via feeds)
Benefits of the platform
Benefits for...

readers: content is free and easily accessible

authors: no costs, greater impact, faster publication, ownership of article,
precise metrics

editors: full control over their publication, less or no headaches about
technical issues, no volumes of specialized knowledge necessary

Linguistic Society of America: "what's good for the discipline is good for the
association", great visibility

HBZ/DIPP: strategic value, experience
C) Where We Are
eLanguage Beta
Recent developments
1.
as of July 2007, four journals have been accredited:

Constructions

Anette Rosenbach (University of Paderborn, Germany),
Alexander Bergs (University of Osnabruck, Gemany)
Journal of Mesoamerican Languages and Linguistics (JMLL)




Linguistic Issues in Language Technology (LiLT)

Annie Zaenen (PARC Inc / Stanford University, USA),
Bonnie Webber (University of Edinburgh, UK),

Martha Palmer (University of Colorado, USA)


David Mora-Marín (University of North Carolina, USA)
Semantics & Pragmatics (S&P)


Kai von Fintel (Massachusetts of Technology, USA)
David Beaver (University of Texas, USA)
2.
a blog has been launched to keep people informed
3.
launch in spring/summer 2008
Issues
1.
producing content takes time
2.
many researchers have a “wait and see” approach to Open Access
3.
communication must be managed well when working in a geographically
dispersed team
4.
for our needs, OJS could be simpler in terms of its UI, even if that meant less
functions
What could we do better?
Once the platform is hugely successful we could look into...

unified citation database

preprint repository (?)

more "reader" involvement (blog comments? link external sources?)
D) The Future: Beyond the Paper Metaphor
What happens if projects like eLanguage succeed?
Let's assume that in the future...

a large percentage of all scholarly research is OA

the storage of research data is heavily centralized in a few powerful archives

the content is annotated manually by its creators, as well as through
automatic means (keyword extraction) and social web practices (tagging)

retrieval of this content largely takes place via commercial search engines
How does the role of academic libraries change if the storage, annotation
and retrieval of information is realized elsewhere?
Publishing as the key role of the future
In the future...

archiving, enrichment and retrieval are likely to be strongly centralized,

while Net access and storage will increasingly be treated as commodities
What remains is to enable the creation and dissemination of scholarly content
as it takes new forms and becomes usable in new ways
Universities, scholarly societies and information infrastructure providers need
to work together to achieve this goal
Thank You for listening!
eLanguage.net
Shifting the paradigm in linguistics from
academic publishing to scholarly communication
Dieter Stein, Cornelius Puschmann
University of Duesseldorf
[email protected]
PKP Scholarly Publishing Conference 2007
12 July 2007